Batch replace audio and media encoding questions

I have a course with lots of audio and I want to apply audio cleanups to all files. I can do that easily in an audio software as a batch process but I'm trying to find a way to batch replace all audio files in Storyline.

As far as I can see - upon publishing, Storyline re-encodes the audio and changes the audio filenames (why oh why???). So even I want to "cheat" and copy new audio to the Story folder, I don't know which file is which, and if I try to cheat differently, by copying all the MP3 files from the Story Folder and run the batch process and then put them back, the quality of the audio will suffer.

6 Replies

The only way I can think to do this (and it would be completely unsupported by Articulate) would be to edit the files within the .story project file itself. I haven't tried this myself, so I can't be positive it would work, but I can't see why it wouldn't.

The .story project file is essentially a .zip file, so if you rename it to .zip (please make sure you have a backup copy of the file before you try this) then you will be able to theoretically extract the zip file, re-encode your audio files, re-zip the folder, and rename the file back to .story. Then just make sure your adjust the encoding quality when you publish.

That's a cool tip, thanks. I did that and you're right, the audio and media is before encoding. It still gives the file arbitrary names. Is that something that happens upon inserting into a project? I can't think of any good reason for that...

I wonder if there is a way to leave the actual filenames intact within a Storyline project file.

Yes, I believe the files are renamed when they are inserted into the project. I'm guessing one reason that is done is to make sure each file has a unique name. I doubt there is any way to change the names without editing the source xml files in the project, and who knows what kind of problems that might cause. :) I thought this solution might work for you because you want to apply changes to the files in bulk. It's definitely more work if you need to identify and change only certain files.

Yeah it's definitely going to help with bulk audio changes. I just hope that the naming conversion could be a little less arbitrary. There should be a way for SL to identify identical names and/or invalid filenames and append some text like "xyz" and "xyz_1" or something like that..

They might have also been trying to keep the file names short. I saw a post recently by someone that was having a problem because the overall path to their published content exceeded the allowed length of a Windows path.